SEM is the wider discipline that incorporates SEO. SEM includes both paid search results (using tools like Google Adwords or Bing Ads, formerly known as Microsoft adCenter) and organic search results (SEO). SEM uses paid advertising with AdWords or Bing Ads, pay per click (particularly beneficial for local providers as it enables potential consumers to contact a company directly with one click), article submissions, advertising and making sure SEO has been done. A keyword analysis is performed for both SEO and SEM, but not necessarily at the same time. SEM and SEO both need to be monitored and updated frequently to reflect evolving best practices.
First, we have a catchy story. A family making a world tour just thanks to Home Exchange! The couple are teachers with 3 kids. Everybody can identify to them. And they realise the dream of those people watching and it is possible thanks to Home Exchange. Anyone would like to understand how that is possible and would like to be in their place. That video, among other communication tools, created huge publicity for them. They have been contacted by the number one channel in France to make a TV report on their project!
At this point, the consumer is weighing their options and deciding on the purchase. Therefore, the goal of this kind of video is to make your audience visualize themselves using your product or service — and thriving. There’s a reason 4X as many customers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it. Videos are able to display functionality and leverage emotions in ways a product description never could.

If you are serious about improving search traffic and are unfamiliar with SEO, we recommend reading this guide front-to-back. We've tried to make it as concise as possible and easy to understand. There's a printable PDF version for those who'd prefer, and dozens of linked-to resources on other sites and pages that are also worthy of your attention.

Search engine optimization consultants expanded their offerings to help businesses learn about and use the advertising opportunities offered by search engines, and new agencies focusing primarily upon marketing and advertising through search engines emerged. The term "search engine marketing" was popularized by Danny Sullivan in 2001[12] to cover the spectrum of activities involved in performing SEO, managing paid listings at the search engines, submitting sites to directories, and developing online marketing strategies for businesses, organizations, and individuals. 7. Keyword research. Specific target keywords aren’t as important for SEO success as they used to be, now that Google search is fueled by semantic and contextual understanding, but you should still be able to identify both head keyword (short, high-volume keywords) and long-tail keyword (longer, conversational, low-volume keywords) targets to guide the direction of your campaign.
Collaborative Environment: A collaborative environment can be set up between the organization, the technology service provider, and the digital agencies to optimize effort, resource sharing, reusability and communications.[36] Additionally, organizations are inviting their customers to help them better understand how to service them. This source of data is called User Generated Content. Much of this is acquired via company websites where the organization invites people to share ideas that are then evaluated by other users of the site. The most popular ideas are evaluated and implemented in some form. Using this method of acquiring data and developing new products can foster the organizations relationship with their customer as well as spawn ideas that would otherwise be overlooked. UGC is low-cost advertising as it is directly from the consumers and can save advertising costs for the organisation.
Video experts often credit 24fps with a more “cinematic” look, while 30fps is more common, especially for videos that need to be projected or broadcasted. A good rule of thumb is to ask the end user of your video what his or her preferences are and shoot based on that. Then, be sure your resolution is at least 1920 x 1080 to maintain quality footage.
View count: View count is the number of times your video has been viewed — also referred to as reach. This metric is great to track if your goal is to increase brand awareness and have your content seen by as many people as possible. However, it’s important to remember that every video hosting platform measures a view differently. For example, a view on YouTube is 30 seconds while a view on Facebook is only 3 seconds. Be sure to read the fine print before reporting on your video view count.
When it comes time to shoot, clear out unnecessary people from the room and turn off the overhead lights. With your three-point lighting setup, there will be no need for those harsh fluorescents. When — and only when — everything is set up, call in your talent. There’s nothing worse than being nervous, and then having to anxiously watch as lights are turned on and the camera is tested.
Earned distribution, like owned, is free. You have relatively little to lose using it other than time and effort, but unlike owned and paid, the payoff can be drastically more unpredictable. From SEO efforts that boost your search presence, to building relationships with influencers you’ve never met, you never quite know what your ROI will be — it can be enormous or it can fizzle to an end. But don’t skip earned distribution altogether! Take a little more time to think strategically about which earned channels will help you accomplish your video goals.

The allure of so-called internet riches is nothing new. At every bend and turn in a gauntlet of online gurus, you'll find internet marketers looking to hype up this supposed dream of making money online or earning passive income while kicking up your feet and letting the cash roll in. While internet marketing doesn't quite work that way, in that you actually do have to put in the work, it isn't too difficult to separate the proverbial men from the boys when it comes to the real online earners.

Try sparking your audience’s curiosity by asking questions and using teasers to hook their attention right away. Your video should immediately convey its value and answer that “why should I watch it?” question that will be on your audience’s mind. Should they watch it because it will make them laugh, because it will inspire them to act or because it will teach them something new? An authority website is a site that is trusted by its users, the industry it operates in, other websites and search engines. Traditionally a link from an authority website is very valuable, as it’s seen as a vote of confidence. The more of these you have, and the higher quality content you produce, the more likely your own site will become an authority too.

Before online marketing channels emerged, the cost to market products or services was often prohibitively expensive, and traditionally difficult to measure. Think of national television ad campaigns, which are measured through consumer focus groups to determine levels of brand awareness. These methods are also not well-suited to controlled experimentation. Today, anyone with an online business (as well as most offline businesses) can participate in online marketing by creating a website and building customer acquisition campaigns at little to no cost. Those marketing products and services also have the ability to experiment with optimization to fine-tune their campaigns’ efficiency and ROI.

Video marketing has countless benefits, but there’s one in particular we want to focus on: improving SEO. Search engine optimization has become such an invaluable tool for marketers; 64 percent of users use search in their I-want-to-buy moments, and 71 percent visit a retailer website or app when they’re in the decision-making stage. That means it’s crucial for your website to not only rank on search engine results pages (SERPs), but rank high.

But Google has championed machine learning as its future and seems 100 percent focused on growing this segment of the algorithm. Going forward, SEO practitioners will need to be proactive and invest in analyzing data and understanding search behavior across a variety of search and social platforms. This way they can develop the type of content that will motivate and influence user/search behavior which will in turn influence rankings and traffic.

While the obvious purpose of internet marketing is to sell goods, services or advertising over the internet, it's not the only purpose a business using internet marketing may have; a company may be marketing online to communicate a message about itself (building its brand) or to conduct research. Online marketing can be a very effective way to identify a target market or discover a marketing segment's wants and needs. (Learn more about conducting market research).
Going into network marketing? Understand that if you're not close to the top of the food chain there, your ability to generate any serious amount of income will be limited. Be wary of the hype and the sales pitches that get you thinking that it's going to work the other way. Simply understand that you're going to have to work hard no matter what you pick to do. Email marketing? Sure. You can do that. But you'll need a massive and very targeted list to make any dent.
Before you can create YouTube video ads as part of your marketing campaign, you must link your AdWords account to your YouTube account. Then you’ll need to import your video into AdWords - or create it if it doesn’t already exist. Once you upload the video, you’ll be able to choose a thumbnail and write some appealing ad text to encourage viewers to watch. The next step is to choose your target audience and budget. Provide some billing information, and you’re ready to run your first video ad.
The next step? How will you communicate with people. Sharpe says that you need to decide on this early on. Will you blog? Will you use social media? Will you build a list by working with solo ad providers? Will you place paid advertisements? What will you do and how will you do it? What you must realize here is that you have to get really good at copy writing. The better you get at copy writing, the more success you'll find as an internet marketer.
Priit is the founder and CEO of DreamGrow Digital, an internet marketing and social media company. With his 20+ years internet marketing experience he is Helping companies to understand and use the digital marketing to reach their target audiences. He's also writing on a personal growth website Fixwillpower.com. He has spoken at hundreds of seminars and conferences on different aspects of internet marketing. Priit is also the organizer of Digital Elite Camp, a leading traffic and conversion event.
In 2013, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals held in Lens.com, Inc. v. 1-800 Contacts, Inc. that online contact lens seller Lens.com did not commit trademark infringement when it purchased search advertisements using competitor 1-800 Contacts' federally registered 1800 CONTACTS trademark as a keyword. In August 2016, the Federal Trade Commission filed an administrative complaint against 1-800 Contacts alleging, among other things, that its trademark enforcement practices in the search engine marketing space have unreasonably restrained competition in violation of the FTC Act. 1-800 Contacts has denied all wrongdoing and is scheduled to appear before an FTC administrative law judge in April 2017.[29] By creating information-dense, accessible, easy-to-interact-with video content, brands can develop a substantial online following and promote customer recall. For an example of a company that’s done this particularly well, consider Headspace, a meditation app that became a $250 million business. The app offers multiple levels of meditation, employing gamification to increase engagement. Users must complete and master each meditation level before advancing. Most sessions are in video format, beautifully crafted with illustrations and layouts true to the brand. It is elegant, consistent and engaging, heavily relying on video.
With the development of this system, the price is growing under the high level of competition. Many advertisers prefer to expand their activities, including increasing search engines and adding more keywords. The more advertisers are willing to pay for clicks, the higher the ranking for advertising, which leads to higher traffic.[15] PPC comes at a cost. The higher position is likely to cost $5 for a given keyword, and $4.50 for a third location. A third advertiser earns 10% less than the top advertiser, while reducing traffic by 50%.[15] The investors must consider their return on investment and then determine whether the increase in traffic is worth the increase.
Search engine marketing, or SEM, is one of the most effective ways to grow your business in an increasingly competitive marketplace. With millions of businesses out there all vying for the same eyeballs, it’s never been more important to advertise online, and search engine marketing is the most effective way to promote your products and grow your business.
FGM Internet Marketing, LLC is a digital marketing and web design company based in Columbia, SC. We have over a decade’s worth of experience working on local, national and international online marketing campaigns, but our passion is helping local businesses grow. FGM Internet Marketing’s suite of online marketing channels will make your business more visible on the web, increase traffic to your website, and convert this into leads and sales.
While the dominance of Wi-Fi as the network access of choice for organizational users everywhere, it can still be devilishly complex to configure and optimize, especially in larger, enterprise-class installations. How do we efficiently, accurately, and cost-effectively optimize the large number of variables involved in any organizational Wi-Fi installation? Significant progress, however, … Continue Reading...
When writing this guide, we reached out to the marketer community to collect case studies and learnings about creative marketing strategies. Most of these examples are included throughout the guide, but some didn’t quite fit. So we included those loose ends here, from the perspective of four awesome marketers. What better way to wrap up this guide than with you, our community?

On the surface, the how of video marketing is pretty simple: Your brand creates videos that, in some way or another, promote your company, drive sales, raise awareness of your products or services, or engage your customers. In practice, it’s a little more complicated. Like many of your marketing efforts, video marketing is data driven, so you’ll want to monitor various metrics and track customer engagement.

If you’re targeting prospects and hoping to nurture them, you’re hopefully giving them a direct action to take. Measuring the ROI here means simply creating tracking links that will give you this information directly. Increases in your desired action taken should show you your exact lift in revenue. (For instance, if you count an email signup as your conversion, your lift in signups should relate directly to a lift in sales, all other things constant. Plus, you’ll have this user information on file and can then track if or when they convert.) Videos are highly shared across the web, and marketers who include rich descriptions and keywords in video titles can also benefit from video platform search visibility and a presence on the video results section of Google. Additionally, adding text transcripts of video content posted on a website can improve the SEO value it has for the site. Pairing video with written content, whether an article or well-written metadata, has proven to be a strong SEO strategy for businesses, with video listings appearing in the top 100 listings for more than 70 percent of searches, according to Marketingweek.

Cash rules all! Yes, creative planning and strategy are important, but let’s be real. Without the proper budget, it’s going to be difficult to get exactly what you want. Plan for the money and resources at your disposal. Plan what you’ll create or shoot in-house and what you may want to outsource to a production company. Plan what you can splurge on and what you may want to save on.

On the surface, the how of video marketing is pretty simple: Your brand creates videos that, in some way or another, promote your company, drive sales, raise awareness of your products or services, or engage your customers. In practice, it’s a little more complicated. Like many of your marketing efforts, video marketing is data driven, so you’ll want to monitor various metrics and track customer engagement.
Trust is the foundation of conversions and sales. But building trust should be a goal on its own. The whole concept of content marketing is based on trust and creating long-term relationships. Stop selling and let the people come to you by providing them interesting and useful information. I couldn’t have said it better than Mark Schaefer, the Executive Director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions:

By 2004, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. In June 2007, The New York Times' Saul Hansell stated Google ranks sites using more than 200 different signals.[25] The leading search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Some SEO practitioners have studied different approaches to search engine optimization, and have shared their personal opinions.[26] Patents related to search engines can provide information to better understand search engines.[27] In 2005, Google began personalizing search results for each user. Depending on their history of previous searches, Google crafted results for logged in users.[28]

One of the earliest adopters of Internet marketing in the world of Fortune 500 companies was the Coca-Cola Corporation. Today, this huge purveyor of soft drinks has one of the strongest online portfolios in the world. More than 12,000 websites link to the Coca-Cola homepage, which itself is a stunning display of Internet savvy. Their homepage alone sports an auto-updating social network column, an embedded video, a unique piece of advertising art, frequently rotating copy, an opt-in user registration tab, tie-in branding with pop culture properties, and even a link to the company's career opportunities page. Despite how busy that sounds, the Coca-Cola homepage is clean and easy to read. It is a triumph of Internet marketing for its confidence, personality, and professionalism.

Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) - While SEO is free, pay-per-click ads are just as they sound; ads you run on a search engine that you pay for each time someone clicks on it. In PPC advertising, you bid the amount you are willing to pay per click. In general, the more you bid, the higher your ad will llikely appear in the search engine results. Google AdWords ​has implemented an additional factor in which your ads are ranked based on the relevancy or importance that Google places on your site, which is very difficult to manipulate. You can also use pay per click advertising to your advantage on your own site. For example, you can make money with Google AdSense and other similar programs.
Small business owners sometimes think that search engine marketing (SEM), also known as pay-per-click advertising (PPC), is not lucrative option for them. They may think they can’t afford it, or that their online presence is not important if they are a local or service-based business. The truth is, as search engines have undeniably become a part of our lifestyles as consumers, there are many ways to leverage them for businesses of any size. This post will introduce you to the basics and benefits of search engine marketing (SEM).
Social media marketing on its own is free to use, as is content marketing if you’re creating and managing the content yourself. Several email marketing platforms have free plans for your first few hundred or thousand subscribers, giving you time to get your revenue increasing before you have to start paying. There are even free keyword research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner that can help you optimize your site at no cost.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) aids businesses gain market online by purchasing Ads on search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. The SEM practices revolve around the promotion of websites in SERPs to optimize the brand presence and conversions. SEM utilizes paid and unpaid advertising means to optimize the promotion of online businesses, and we especially created this What is Search Engine Marketing Guide to help you understand how both ‘paid & unpaid means’ work under the umbrella term Search Engine Marketing.

Native advertising embeds your video content onto a third-party website in a natural way that doesn’t disrupt the user’s experience. For instance, if you own a bakery and created a commercial about all the different types of cakes you sell, your video might be naturally embedded on a food website in an article about baking. This advertising is slightly more expensive than social or search ads, but have high returns thanks to the relevance of the content.

SEO in 2018 is the process of increasing organic traffic by creating content and optimizing webpages that match what search engine users are seeking. Search engine algorithms are closer than ever to mimicking a human understanding of query intent based on artificial intelligence; therefore the focus of all aspects of SEO need to be biased toward users with an emphasis on relevancy, quality, and engagement.
Having a ‘keyword rich’ domain name may lead to closer scrutiny from Google. According to Moz, Google has “de-prioritized sites with keyword-rich domains that aren’t otherwise high-quality. Having a keyword in your domain can still be beneficial, but it can also lead to closer scrutiny and a possible negative ranking effect from search engines—so tread carefully.”
Engineer by Education, Marketing Influencer by Profession, and Creative Writer by Passion- Shivendra is involved in Branding, Advertising & Consulting in the domain of Digital Marketing over the years. He relies upon his Digital Marketing learnings and uses the creative DNA for composing blogs that have the applied zeal to engage, entertain and inspire the readers- to Connect- Convince- Convert their target audiences via different digital media channels.
Once you understand how everything works, and your expectations are set the right way, decide what you want to do. Do you want to become an affiliate marketer? Do you want to be a network marketer? Do you want to become a blogger and sell your own products? Squeeze pages, which are glorified sales pages that attract people and direct their attention towards a single action of providing their email address, are created in a variety of methods. The better they are, the more likely they'll convert.

Internet marketing is a number of things. And true success in the field involves an immersion into several skill sets that are required if you really want to succeed at the highest level. That's why I knew I needed to go the top of the food chain of online marketers to get an understanding of what this actually takes. And it's important to note that while there are many hyped-up gurus out there, there are also genuine individuals that aren't just looking to extract money from you.

Search engines use complex mathematical algorithms to guess which websites a user seeks. In this diagram, if each bubble represents a website, programs sometimes called spiders examine which sites link to which other sites, with arrows representing these links. Websites getting more inbound links, or stronger links, are presumed to be more important and what the user is searching for. In this example, since website B is the recipient of numerous inbound links, it ranks more highly in a web search. And the links "carry through", such that website C, even though it only has one inbound link, has an inbound link from a highly popular site (B) while site E does not. Note: Percentages are rounded.

Not every single ad will appear on every single search. This is because the ad auction takes a variety of factors into account when determining the placement of ads on the SERP, and because not every keyword has sufficient commercial intent to justify displaying ads next to results. However, the two main factors that Google evaluates as part of the ad auction process are your maximum bid and the Quality Score of your ads. Our SEM team has been managing paid search since its inception and is driven solely by analytics and financial data. Our core focus is to expand our clients’ campaigns, drive quality traffic that will foster conversions and increase revenue, while decreasing the cost per acquisition. IMI’s PPC team members are recognized thought leaders, active bloggers and speakers and major tradeshows, and care deeply about each and every client. We manage our client’s budgets as if it was our own, tracking every dollar and optimizing towards very specific milestones and metrics.
Sharpe, who's presently running a company called Legendary Marketer, teaching you how to duplicate his results, is a prime example. By understanding how Sharpe has constructed his value chain, positioned his offerings and built out his multi-modality sales funnels, you'll better get a larger grasp on things. As confusing as it sounds at the outset, all you need to do is start buying up products in your niche so that you can replicate their success.
As you’re planning your entire production, from creative ideation to actual video distribution, you should have a timeline to stick to. You should actually have multiple — overall timeline, production timeline, distribution timeline, and more. Your timeline serves as your guiding light, keeping you aware of how much you’ve done and what’s left to do.
Social sharing and comments: If you’re on social media, you’re probably familiar with sharing and commenting. Social shares and comments are good indicators of how relevant your content is with your target audience. If a viewer watches your video and takes the time to share it with their network, you probably created a great piece of content. Social shares are also important because the more times your video is shared, the more it’ll be viewed. If your goal is to reach to reach a lot of people, social shares is good metric to track.
Today, one of the biggest trends driving the digital marketing world is responsive design. When a company’s content doesn’t perform well on a given device or browser system, the business behind it loses traffic and suffers decreased conversions as a result. Fortunately, video content is fit for consumption on all devices, ranging from computers to mobile phones. This expands video’s reach and makes it more user-friendly and consumer-focused.

The allure of so-called internet riches is nothing new. At every bend and turn in a gauntlet of online gurus, you'll find internet marketers looking to hype up this supposed dream of making money online or earning passive income while kicking up your feet and letting the cash roll in. While internet marketing doesn't quite work that way, in that you actually do have to put in the work, it isn't too difficult to separate the proverbial men from the boys when it comes to the real online earners.

Another ethical controversy associated with search marketing has been the issue of trademark infringement. The debate as to whether third parties should have the right to bid on their competitors' brand names has been underway for years. In 2009 Google changed their policy, which formerly prohibited these tactics, allowing 3rd parties to bid on branded terms as long as their landing page in fact provides information on the trademarked term.[27] Though the policy has been changed this continues to be a source of heated debate.[28]

In the last 10 years, the digital landscape has changed significantly. People are phasing out desktop and laptop computers to search the web and interact with content. Instead, they are picking up their mobile phones and tablets. What’s more, digital technology is cheaper today than it’s ever been before; there are virtually no boundaries on how, when and where people can interact with content.

Narrative videos are probably the most recognizable style of video besides animation. They use classic storytelling elements, including character building, conflict, and resolution, to tell your brand story in an entertaining and engaging way. They create a journey — one your viewer can easily follow and relate to. Client: Key Smart (Curv Group) Because their goal is to tell a story, narrative videos often work best top of funnel, when users are just learning about the problem they face and you’re introducing your brand. Whether you tell the story of how your company came to be, the story of a frustrated customer finding you for the first time, or the story of a fictional hero character, your narrative should be memorable and help your brand stay on the mind of anyone who watches it.

In years gone by, Google has appeared to be giving preferential treatment to mobile over desktop. In 2015, the mobile-friendly update or ‘Mobilegeddon’ as it became informally known, paved the way for mobile-friendly content creators to rank higher. Since then, we’ve also seen the Mobile-first Index and a number of other activities aimed at bettering the consumer experience on mobile.